Recipes rarely pop out of a chef ’s brain fully formed. They typically start with a little spark of an idea, and then comes the tinkering until they grow into something original and delicious, like pastry chef Rebekah Turshen’s buttermilk cornmeal cookies with sorghum marshmallow filling. “I usually have in my head what I want it to taste like and the texture and the visuals,” she says. “Then I just have to get there.”
Turshen landed her first baking job in 1993 while pursuing a graphic arts degree at the University of Mississippi. “It was kind of a fluke,” she says. But as it turned out, she liked making pastry better than graphic arts. After college, she continued to work in various Oxford kitchens. “I just started learning from books and magazines,” she says. “Because I was at small independent places and it was the 1990s, I could just work things out as I went.”
Since 2009, she has been an anchor at City House in Nashville, where her buttermilk cornmeal cookies were born. This time the spark came from New York pastry chef Christina Tosi’s Milk Bar, which started right around the time Turshen began working at City House. Tosi made a popular cookie with freeze-dried corn and corn flour. That got Turshen thinking about the skillet cornbread she grew up eating. “My mom and her dad liked to do that thing where they would pour the buttermilk over it and have it as a snack in a glass,” she says. Could she translate that into cookie form?
She figured out that medium-grind cornmeal offered the right texture for the cornbread nod she was looking for. For the buttermilk tang, she turned to buttermilk powder, common in Southern supermarkets. To add textural contrast, she mixed salt with sugar as a topping that bakes into a crinkly finish.
For years she had played with various recipes for the marshmallow filling, some of which required an acrobat’s timing. She eventually landed on a simplified method that makes it easier to incorporate sorghum-infused syrup into the whipped egg whites once it reaches the right temperature (the soft-ball stage in candy making). Vanilla, salt, and vinegar balance the marshmallow’s sweetness and give it more character.
If making marshmallow isn’t in your plans, the cookies are lovely on their own, especially with a cup of tea or a glass of milk. “I was trying to think about something you would want to come back for,” Turshen says. She nailed it. They went on the City House cookie plate as soon as she came up with them and have remained a favorite ever since.
MEET THE CHEF: REBEKAH TURSHEN
Hometown: Columbia, Tennessee
How to become a better baker: Bake regularly, and try out a handful of bakers’ recipes to learn different skills. “It’s all practice, repetition, and attention.”
Kitchen items she would grab if the house were on fire: Her new stand mixer and the cast-iron hamburger press from the truck stop her grandparents owned in Tennessee.
Why she’s a sucker for candy: “I like tasting all different cultures’ versions of sweets.” She also appreciates innovations from chef friends who specialize in candy making, like the Persian-inspired chocolate bars from Louisa Shafia in Nashville. (Coffee tahini and the crispy rice with saffron are her faves.)
